We spend a lot of time coming up with ideas. Some are good and useful, and a lot are really bad and should be immediately sent to the Death Star dump. It turns out we do our best brainstorming in the car, when we’re supposed to be enjoying time away from the studio. Apparently, “enjoying time” means “thinking about work.” So be it. We’re not going to fight it. So, on last weekend’s trip to the zoo, we brought along the manuscript for our next Bobbledy Book. Matthew drove while I sat in the passenger seat with my red pen and the next book, titled (at the moment), The Imaginary Dragon. Spoiler alert: it’s about a dragon. Matthew usually writes ideas for illustrations into the manuscript, some of which I agree with, but a lot of which I don’t. This makes for some good red pen action.
But even the ones I agree with need some tweaking, so we talk about each little section and I take notes, so I can remember what we talked about when it comes time to draw. We also talk about refining the writing, so there is definitely some moving around of text and some very red-pen-appropriate demands for rewrites.
I always do the note-taking at this stage, because I need to be able to make sure that the ideas that we have during the brainstorm are the same ones that pop into my head after reading the notes. I have such a terrible memory that even sometimes just writing, “Draw the dragon standing on the mountain here,” isn’t enough. So I end up with weird little seemingly cryptic notes and pictures that look like this:
but that generally do the trick when it comes to remembering. You wouldn’t know it, but those little pointy lines coming in from the left are spears pointed in the direction of the dragon, who is that sideways lightbulb-shaped thing on the right, and the little bunny ear with the scribbles around it in the top right hand corner is supposed to be a bunch of burning trees. At least it’s clear that the king with his crown on is poking his head in from the left. Clear as a bell.
Matthew saves everything that we do, even if it’s a bunch of indecipherable doodles on the edges of a manuscript. So he was not pleased when over the course of our trip to DC some sort of sticky drink was spilled on the manuscript and stuck all of the pages together. The pages then needed to be surgically separated, and given the fact that neither of us is really a surgeon, the outcome was not ideal.
There were very few doodles hurt in the process, though, so we’ll chalk it up as a success. The manuscript will go at the top of a giant pile of such Idiots’ detritus, and we’ll just hope it doesn’t stick to whatever things get piled on top of it.
And now that that important part of the process is done, it’s time for me to get to work.
